Is Haramina Arriving in the Nick of Time? : Sockers: He has spent much of the season in pain following his arrival in a trade from Kansas City, but his performance in the past few games may bode well for the MISL playoffs.

He often could be found standing in the locker room in street clothes watching teammates prepare for a game. And nobody ever scored a game-winning goal wearing slacks and a dress shirt.

Damir Haramina has dealt with more than a sore quadriceps and strained knee this season. A forward acquired during preseason by the Sockers from Kansas City for a conditional draft pick, Haramina has had an abundance of time to wonder if he will ever regain the form that made him the Comets’ third-leading scorer of all time.

He has played only 18 games as a Socker and, until he scored four goals in the final three games of the regular season, didn’t have many reasons to be optimistic about his future in the MISL. His eight goals and four assists look a bit thin compared with 111 and 65 in 143 games with the Comets. His statistics are downright skinny considering his total salary of $60,000, which includes $15,000 paid by Kansas City.

But Haramina, 27, has had trouble ridding himself of all the nagging pains. It was the same thing last season, when he scored just three goals in 13 games for the Comets after undergoing separate surgeries for a cracked kneecap and then a hernia.

Because he was eager to show his new teammates what he could do, Haramina told Socker Coach Ron Newman he was fit to play for this season’s opener in Dallas. It was a bad decision. He wasn’t ready to go full speed and wound up having to miss the next 13 games with a quadriceps strain.

When he was finally healthy, Newman was reluctant to play him. He wasn’t sure he was ready to do the things the Sockers needed him to do, such as take pressure off Branko Segota. So Haramina had to stand around and listen to people question his ability and desire.

Did this team really want him? Or was he just proof that even Newman, winner of seven championships, was capable of striking a bum deal?

“After a while, sure, people start to talk,” says Haramina, originally from Yugoslavia. “But I don’t care. I don’t listen. I know how good I am. I know how good I can play. You get disappointed, but I’m a strong person. I never lost confidence in myself.”

But Newman did. He considered trading him.

“I had lost confidence in him,” Newman says. “I needed to see that he had more confidence in training before I could risk playing him again.

“We were running out of time. We needed help, and we kept looking there, and there wasn’t any. We took him thinking any minute he was going to start playing again. We took a gamble. It looked like we lost the gamble.”

Though it might not have been evident at times, Haramina had a fairly strong support group. Midfielder Brian Quinn, who also missed a number of games with injuries, kept telling him not to get discouraged. Segota and Haramina would talk, too; Segota has been through this.

“I know what it’s like,” Segota says. “I can relate. The same thing happened to me the year before. It’s awful. It’s the worst thing for a player.”

Despite the pressure Newman was under to win, he was sympathetic to Haramina’s plight.

“I stuck up for him in many ways when other people thought he couldn’t play through pain,” Newman said. “I said ‘I don’t think it has to do with playing through pain.’ His big fear is that he will do it (hurt himself) again.

“We all get impatient because we think, ‘Why doesn’t he just bite the bit and get after it.’ But I could see what was going through his mind.”

Haramina’s personality often requires people to guess what he’s thinking. He is soft spoken, rarely initiating a conversation. That isn’t to say he doesn’t have opinions, but you don’t usually hear them until you get to know him a little.

Larry Freeman, public relations director of the Comets, used to room with Haramina on trips. One time, Haramina walked into the hotel room and saw Freeman tearing his hair out trying to figure out how to pronounce names from a roster of a Soviet team that Kansas City was to play in an exhibition game.

Haramina asked him what he was doing, and Freeman told him he couldn’t get a handle on all the strange names. With “The Beverly Hillbillies” blaring in the background, Haramina sat down and meticulously began to write out a roster of phonetic spellings, which Freeman eventually distributed to all the radio announcers.

Sometimes it’s the little gestures that are most remembered.

“We don’t miss him in the scoring department,” Freeman says, “but we miss the person. He’s a very kind man.”

It is hard to blame Kansas City Coach Dave Clements for trading Haramina, who was tentative about his return after his injuries. Haramina was a high salary player, and Clements expected productivity.

It’s tough to fault Haramina, either. He spent hours in the weight room rehabilitating his knee after surgery. His legs were perhaps stronger afterward, and he started playing again, but soon after, he felt a twinge in his midsection. The doctor told him he had a hernia and would have to have surgery again.

“Oh, man, I went crazy,” he says.

After that, he was never able to get back on track in Kansas City.

“(Clements) just didn’t want to play me,” Haramina says. “I don’t know what his problem was. He just didn’t probably like me because I’m quiet. I did a lot for that team.”

When he saw things weren’t going to change at the beginning of this season, Haramina requested a trade, and Clements obliged. Haramina came to the Sockers with a fresh start, but until about two weeks ago, there was nothing fresh about it. It was the same old thing. He was injured, and he was a spectator.

But last weekend, in victories over Wichita and Tacoma, everybody finally saw why Haramina created such a stir in Kansas City. He scored three goals, and the velocity of his shot was enough to make Socker goalie Victor Nogueira marvel.

“I can’t believe how fast he shoots,” Nogueira was saying after the 6-1 victory over Tacoma. “I wouldn’t want to have to be the goalie in front of that.”

It wasn’t any big deal to Haramina.

“That’s me,” he says. “That’s how I play.”

The reaction from his teammates?

“I think they say ‘That’s normal,’ ” he says. “ ‘That’s Damir.’ ”

If the real Damir stays standing, the Sockers will get a much-needed offensive lift in their best-of-five playoff series with St. Louis, which starts Saturday night at 8:30 in the San Diego Sports Arena. In the back of Newman’s mind, even when he was filled with doubts, he knew Haramina could come around and do some special things. Ultimately, that probably kept him from trading him.

“I felt as soon as we traded him,” Newman says, “it would be just then that he started to put it together again.”

If Newman’s patience paid off, so too did Haramina’s. Through all the frustration of what was nearly a lost season, Haramina, true to his nature, kept mum and waited for his opportunity. Verbal jousts and controversy are common on this team, but Haramina refused to get involved.

“I don’t like to talk,” he says. “I’m not one of those guys who talks. I just like to play.”